From outside, the little wooden beach house looks like any other summer retreat in Vilano Beach. It’s the inside that’s surprising, smacking suspiciously of a spy’s hideaway: black, waterproof cases hold cameras, buoys, crossbows and grappling hooks. Maps and copious notes line the walls, while computers unfold across desks.

This is home base and “mission control” for the southeast team of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s North Atlantic Right Whale Project. A team of eight scientists sets up camp here every year to keep tabs on the right whales migrating to the North Florida area. Funding for the project is provided by NOAA Fisheries, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

As the only known calving grounds for the endangered North Atlantic right whale population, the coasts of Georgia and northern Florida are a significant critical habitat. Right whale season generally lasts from Nov. 15 to April 15, but the Right Whale Project monitors from December through March.

“That’s the core time,” said Tom Pitchford, a senior scientist with the North Atlantic Right Whale Project.

The majority of whales moving through are juveniles, but pregnant females also travel here to give birth. Pitchford said the whales could be attracted to the ocean's warm water from the Gulf Stream.

“The adults are well-insulated and can withstand cold water, but the calf doesn’t have that insulating blubber. The mother knows where the comfort zone is,” he said.

Some additional perks for a wary, expectant mother include calm seas and a lack of predators.

Of the hundreds of whales that make the trip, a mere two births have been witnessed by researchers. Katie Jackson, another senior scientist with the project, said the newborns look very clean and smooth — very surreal compared to the older whales with skin that has roughened, accumulated nicks and scratches, and developed the textured patches of skin on the tops of their heads known as “callosities” that serve as a whale’s idiosyncratic fingerprint. White crustaceans known as “whale lice” attach to these patches of skin to make a unique pattern that scientists use to differentiate between individual whales.

Each North Atlantic Right Whale Project member is rigorously trained for carrying out the tasks of the project’s keystones: conducting aerial surveys, aiding stranded whales, salvaging carcasses and taking biopsies to determine genetic relationships. The research the scientists collect and process is kept on file for reference and sent to the New England Aquarium to be catalogued and made available to other research endeavors. The southeast team is in constant contact with a network of other whale watching groups, including other regional scientists from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, NOAA Fisheries and Sea to Shore Alliance, as well as volunteer organizations.

Monitoring right whales is a 24/7 job. The 50- to 60-foot animals can appear at any time and travel the length of states within a matter of hours.

“Whales show up in the darnedest places,” said Jackson, who reported one of the southeast team’s first sightings of this season from the front window of the team's beach house.

Team members rotate duties on a daily basis, and a few people are always on standby to respond to events such as entanglements. As right whales make the journey southward, many become wrapped up and enmeshed in underwater obstacles such as lobster trap lines. Rope can become tangled over a whale and eventually cut into its skin, flippers and tail to create serious infections. Rope that gets caught inside of a whale's mouth is especially dangerous — right whales use baleen, which lines their mouths in sheets like vertical venetian blinds, to filter their food. If the baleen gets separated, it can prevent the whale from feeding and lead to a slow starvation.

Disentangling right whales is not the spontaneous Indiana Jones maneuver one might expect, considering the rescue equipment used by the scientists. It’s easy to imagine researchers speeding up to a bound whale, letting an arrow fly and cutting an offensive rope free. Disentanglement is, in fact, much trickier business, Jackson said.

“We assess all entangled whales, so once they are detected we will go out and take photographs and even take underwater video footage if necessary to try and get an idea of what the entanglement looks like,” she said. “And then we come up with a plan.”

Disentanglements efforts can take days of careful preparation and analysis before an actual cutting takes place. Attempts to free whales can be thwarted if the whale becomes skittish and agitated at the approach of rescue boats.

Jackson said it’s also about deciding what is best for the whale, which can sometimes mean leaving it entangled and letting it go.

“If it turns out the whale is extremely evasive and it has a very minor entanglement, then it might be able to get rid of the rest of the entanglement on its own,” she said.

This is not always an easy decision, but the scientists don’t want to cause the whale undue stress.

One example is Kingfisher, a whale Jackson keeps an eye out for every year. When researchers first encountered him, he appeared to be hog-tied.

“He was an animal I saw my first season flying surveys,” Jackson said. “When he showed up as a yearling, he had a massive entanglement. It was wrapped all around his body and he had buoys strapped to his body, and it was a major effort to try and get him free from those things.”

The rescue team cut one of his lines but soon lost track of him after a boater accidentally ran over the rope connecting Kingfisher to his tracking buoy. But he showed up the following year with only an entanglement around his right flipper. Jackson said these kinds of entanglements have the potential to be severe.

“They can be tight and constricting and become infected and dig into the bone and cause all kinds of problems,” she said.

But Kingfisher’s entanglement never became seriously tight. He is 9 years old now and still lives with his handicap. Kingfisher remains the longest and most chronically entangled right whale known to researchers, and scientists up and down the coast keep a watch on him.

“So far, he’s beating the odds,” Jackson said.

Much of the research, observation and analysis to come out of the North Atlantic Right Whale Project has led to advocacy efforts and policy change within the shellfish and fishing industries. Many states have regulations detailing how ropes on traps should be spread on the ocean floor to minimize the amount of line in the water column. Their work also promotes preventative measures and situational awareness: the federal “no approach” law, for instance, prohibits people getting closer than 500 yards to a whale. Another rule requires ships to slow down to 10 knots in zones of critical whale habitat. By matter of course the team provides whale locations and information for ships coming and going into ports so that collisions can be avoided.

This was a quiet year for the southeast Right Whale Project. The 2011-12 season saw a drastic reduction in whale sightings from previous years, with only 68 spotted, compared to numbers that are usually well more than 100.

“I’m not worried... I’m bummed,” Jackson said of the scant sightings.

The unusually warm winter seems to have discouraged many whales from making the trip down. But Jackson is hesitant to jump to conclusions about the cause of low whale numbers.

“Right whales are a very long-lived species, so changes happen for them over a very long period of time. We’re looking at such a small snapshot of their lives,” she said.

To truly understand the causes and implications of this year’s slow season, researchers need more comprehensive and complete data spread over a long period of time. Serious, in-depth right whale research has only been going on since the 1970s and '80s, and Jackson is quick to point out that because of this, there are still a number of unknowns.

“You really have to look on a decade-long scale to get any idea what’s going on with right whales. So we’re working on that,” she said.

Spoken like a true scientist, Jackson embraces this anomalous year as an opportunity to study what may not have been addressed in the past.

“The absence of whales is just as interesting as having a bunch of whales,” she said.

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To see more photos taken for the North Atlantic Right Whale Project, go to the team's Flickr page. To see photos of the scientists' home base in Vilano Beach (including some shots of senior scientist Katie Jackson), check out Drift's Spotted gallery.